Tuesday, 8 March 2016

Illiterates still pouring forth. Educationalists still unfazed by failure.

Imagine if, for several decades, your profession had delivered not success, but wholesale abject failure.

Imagine if, instead of the results you claimed to be striving for, your efforts were by contrast delivering the very opposite.

At what point, I wonder, would you question the methods of your profession – and perhaps even to wonder what your profession was truly trying to achieve.

I ask, because after decades of factory schooling, the very basic aim of that schooling – teaching students to read and write and count – is still failing. Or, in the words of that failing system: still not being achieved.

Universities* and employers taking in these failures have commented on this for years, yet nothing has changed.

Timber processing company Juken New Zealand's mill manager, Paul Jordan, told RNZ News the literacy and numeracy of many school leavers he had hired in recent years was not up to scratch, even though they had NCEA. "We're talking about the ability to comprehend written instructions, keep themselves safe, follow simple recipes for manufacturing and measure sizes and volumes and maybe do a little bit of conversion on that," he said. "[Those are] very fundamental literacy and numeracy skills that sometimes are completely absent…." Mr Jordan said many of the school leavers with poor literacy and numeracy had met the minimum requirements [to pass NCEA] …

A new report makes clear that being able to read and write is no barrier to passing NCEA. Meaning employers like Juken are having to take on the job that our taxes were supposed to already have well paid for.

It is not for any lack of time in the classroom. Yet despite the government’s teachers having the time to indoctrinate children in subjects like social justice, climate change and the importance of recycling – and parents happily delivering their loved ones into their care every morning – they have neither time nor any proper programme to deliver decent reading, writing and arithmetic.

When literacy dives at home, as it has -- more feel-good crap and less real learning seems to be the motto of the state's factory schools both here and the US -- then it becomes easier to hire literate workers 'outsourced' from offshore.Outsourcing the literate – NOT PC, 2005

Illiterate graduates of the State's factory schools have been let down by a system that promotes the government's chosen values ahead of promoting real learning. We are all the losers. Neither free nor education – NOT PC, 2005

Things are bad all over. Literacy figures across the western world have been getting worse and worse for years … Can you imagine then, in a world of rampant and increasing illiteracy, a school which goes against fashion and where students are actually taught to read, and to write well?Reading, writing and teaching that works – NOT PC, 2007

It’s not just that teachers don’t want to be found out for their lacklustre teaching – although that’s the motivation for many of them – it’s that today’s fashionable educational theories mitigate against any objectivity at all, or even genuine education.Standards? What standards? – NOT PC, 2009

If there’s a silver bullet for improving the appalling literacy rates of the youngsters who leave NZ’s factory schools it’s not National Bloody Standards, it’s phonics. Phonics from an early age to teach youngsters properly what those marks on the page sound like, and at a later age to repair the damage of those teachers who told them the marks themselves didn’t matter – that it was okay just to guess.There’s a frickin’ elephant in the schoolroom – NOT PC, 2009

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